Those on-off talks between Novell Inc and AT&T Co first revealed by our sister paper Unigram.X (CI No 1,987) culminated suddenly just before Christmas in an announcement that Novell would be acquiring Unix System Laboratories Inc outright for 12.3m new shares, representing about 4% of Novell’s expanded equity and valuing Unix Labs at an indicated […]
Those on-off talks between Novell Inc and AT&T Co first revealed by our sister paper Unigram.X (CI No 1,987) culminated suddenly just before Christmas in an announcement that Novell would be acquiring Unix System Laboratories Inc outright for 12.3m new shares, representing about 4% of Novell’s expanded equity and valuing Unix Labs at an indicated $353.6m. The letter of intent calls for Novell to exchange the small shareholdings in Unix Labs held by about a dozen Unix acolytes, for shares in itself, so that it will own the company outright. The move will bring together in a single company the one open mid-range and high-end operating system with the dominant network operating system and the DR DOS MS DOS compatible desktop operating system, creating the most convincing challenge to Microsoft Corp since the latter achieved dominance of the desktop. Details: page 5
